A LEAD ARTICLE ON THE front page of Pravda for Friday, 12 September 1975, unsigned and therefore unimpeachably representing the current line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, provides an authoritative introduction to the idea of song as a component of official Soviet culture:

“A song helps us build and live” has become a well-known saying. It contains an acknowledgment of the great social role of this most mass-oriented genre of art. The revolutionary song resounded at the early illegal May Day meetings, on the barricades of class battles, the fronts of the Civil War. Its heir, the new Soviet song, accompanied the people who built cities and factories, upturned virgin soil for the collective farms, and waged war against the Fascist aggressors. Today, the best creations of our songwriters are helping the Soviet people build, and are making life more interesting and spiritually richer.

Songs have a large civic resonance, and they reflect in vivid and graphic form the main things by which the toilers of the Land of the Soviets live today; they are taken up by millions. They are becoming a means for the ideological-political and moral-aesthetic education of the broad masses.

The article enunciates a categorical principle:

All work connected with the creation and propaganda of song must issue from the demands formulated by the XXIV Congress of the CPSU: “The Soviet people have an interest in the creation of works that truthfully reflect reality and with great artistic power confirm the ideas of Communism.”

And it closes with what is normal in Pravda editorials, a peremptory specification of what the people want:

Soviet people expect from poets and composers new, inspired songs that give genuine joy to millions, songs which are helpmeets in our Communist work of construction.¹

The line quoted at the beginning of the article, “A song helps us build and live,” actually is familiar to literally every Soviet citizen. The text it comes from may fairly be used to introduce what is known in the USSR as a “mass song” (massovaya pesnya). This term covers just about everything considered suitable for publication, apart from folk songs and Lieder. The song was written in 1934 for the Komsomol by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach (1898–1949), one of the most revered of Soviet songwriters, and is entitled “Merry Children’s March” (“Marsh veselykh rebyat”). Two of its more striking verses are the following:

Our hearts are light from our merry song,

It never lets us get bored;

Villages and hamlets love the song,

And big cities love it, too.

Stride forward, Komsomol tribe,

Joke and sing, let your smiles blossom!

We are conquering space and time,

We are the young masters of the earth!

The last verse runs:

And if an enemy in stubborn battle

Should want to steal our vital joy,

We’ll sing a martial song,

We’ll stand and fight for the Motherland!

And the song’s refrain, from which the line quoted by Pravda actually comes, carries the main message:

A song helps us build and live,

Like a friend, it summons us and leads us forward;

And whoever strides through life with a song

Will never be lost anywhere!²

The Pravda article and the “Merry Children’s March” illustrate the primary function and the nature of the “mass song” in Soviet society as seen by those who run that society. For them the song is a component of Soviet culture, and as such it is subject to the same requirements and restrictions as any other aspect of that culture. Uppermost among the requirements is that the work should use the “basic method” of all Soviet art, Socialist Realism. This “method” was first promulgated with reference to literature, in the original Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers when it was established in 1934, and defined in the following way:

Socialist Realism, the basic method of Soviet belles-lettres and literary criticism, demands of the artist truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. . . .

At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness in the artistic representation of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remoulding and training the labouring people in the spirit of socialism.³

What Socialist Realism actually does mean is a problem that has given rise over the years to some of the most tortured theoretical writing ever produced in the USSR.⁴ The explicitly aesthetic element in the phrase, “Realism,” itself indefinable in an unambiguous or constructive way in any context, has in practice managed to encompass a wide variety of styles. In the last twenty years in particular it has been subjected by writers to considerable expansion.⁵ However, no matter how sincere the originators of the method were about its aesthetic aspect, and no matter how Soviet critics may agonize about its true meaning and manipulate it as the literature itself evolves, the fact remains that the fundamental reason for the existence of the doctrine is political. It asserts the principle that the artist’s ultimate loyalty shall be to the Party’s requirements in the interests of building Communism, rather than to his art or himself. The interpretation of the formula can then be manipulated as required to encourage or discourage according to the Party’s current political concerns.

This attention to the Party’s concerns and requirements, and subservience to them, are what is essentially meant by the concept of “Partymindedness” (partiinost’), which is another requirement that has been exacted of the arts since the early 1930s. And there are several other features which are usually considered to be “inextricably bound up with” Socialist Realism. The one that produces the most salient results is that in their effort to help the Party in its task of bringing about Communism, the arts should provide a human model for emulation, in the form of the “positive hero,” who should be endowed with those characteristics that fit him to participate in the Party’s work. He should be strong and balanced both physically and psychologically, socially aware, enthusiastic, and optimistic. Surprisingly, this general formula has managed to encompass over time quite a broad range of literary characters. Stemming inevitably from the requirement that the arts reflect and aid the Party’s purpose is that they should embody its view of human history, which is, of course, a progressive one. The detectability of this view within the work of art enables it to be regarded as satisfactory in terms of “ideological awareness” (ideinost’). Triviality or inconsequentiality is impermissible within Socialist Realism.

Party-mindedness, ideological awareness, the positive hero, and the progressive view of human history are prominent features of Socialist Realist works of art. But there are several other characteristics of Soviet art which are less strongly emphasized in theory, but which to the non-Soviet observer are just as noticeable. Chief among them is patriotism. The Motherland must be revered, and it is not permissible to lose faith in her, nor to doubt that her best interests are enshrined in the Party and its plans. There is also the requirement that the work of art must be comprehensible and morally beneficial (in the definition of the Party) to the average person. Soviet art works hand in hand with the state system of education in the inculcation of Party objectives. The didactic quality of Soviet art, overt or covert, is understandable in the context of mass literacy recently and laboriously achieved. But in its institutionalized form it has the effect of stultifying experiment and producing a uniform middlebrow art. The idea that the function of art (much less its sine qua non) might be to challenge and subvert is anathema to Socialist Realist thinking.

The establishment of a monolithic artistic method was one aspect of the totalitarianization of Soviet cultural life that was undertaken by the Party under Stalin in the early 1930s. It introduced a new element into the age-old Russian institution of censorship. The imposition of a system of censorship, which had been abolished after the February Revolution, was one of the first acts of the new Soviet government when it seized power in October 1917. During the 1920s the system was proscriptive, and fairly permissive on the whole, functioning as under tsarism to suppress matters which officialdom did not wish to have publicly discussed. With Stalinism and totalitarianism, censorship also took on a prescriptive element. It now acts as the final instance in a network of inducements, incentives, and prerogatives designed to get out the cultural products the Party requires and whose specifications it stipulates.

There can be no doubt that after fifty years in continuous operation, the system of prescriptive and proscriptive censorship works well, especially in combination with the self-censorship it now engenders as second nature in creative artists in the USSR.⁶ Lebedev-Kumach’s “March” is an example of the results, and it bears the hallmarks of Soviet Socialist Realism in practice, in one particular aspect of the arts. It uses simple, accessible language and a form that is not in any way disturbing or experimental. It has a clear message, is optimistic, and has a note of patriotism. Perhaps the most striking thing about it to the foreign eye, especially in view of the term Realism in the official formula, is the total lack of specificity, in place or time, or in reference to persons and events. This song is one of the staples of the Soviet repertoire. It is included in just about every one of the dozens of songbooks that roll off the Soviet presses year by year in mass editions. An examination of one of these songbooks will make it possible to amplify the impression of the official song that the Komsomol march presents.

The collection Russian Soviet Songs, 1917–1977,⁷ published during the sixtieth-anniversary year of the Revolution, is claimed by its compilers to present “a poetic chronicle of the Russian Soviet song over the sixty years of its development.” A recent American commentator has found this claim to be largely justified.⁸ The anthology begins, as do all Soviet mass songbooks, with what might be called the Old Testament of revolutionary song, the anthems of the labor movement before the October Revolution. The main ones are the Party’s anthem, “The International,” followed by Leonid Radin’s “Bravely, Comrades, in Step” (“Smelo, tovarishchi, v nogu,” 1896), Gleb Krzyzanowski’s “Warsaw Song” (“Varshavyanka,” 1897), Petr Lavrov’s “Workers’ Marseillaise” (“Rabochaya Marsel’eza,” 1905), and Grigory Machtet’s “Tormented by Oppressive Bondage” (“Zamuchen tyazheloi nevolei,” 1876). These songs are familiar to every Soviet person. They are performed and recorded endlessly by every kind of ensemble and are heavily featured on TV and radio, and in concert performances, by amateurs and professionals alike.

After them come the classics of the Civil War; then the anthems of the construction period of the 1930s, like Lebedev-Kumach’s “March”; then the songs of the Second World War; and then a lesser number of songs from the period up to the mid-1950s, their paucity reflecting the current unacceptability of the copious references to Stalin that songs of the time obligatorily contained; and finally, there are some songs of the post-Stalin period that are already considered classics. These songs as a whole reflect the same stages of evolution that have been undergone by other aspects of Soviet culture since the Revolution: the bravado of the 1920s, increasingly ponderous solemnity in the 1930s, a rapprochement with genuine popular aspirations during the war, strangulation in the last years of Stalinism, uncertain and always precarious reinvigoration under Khrushchev, and finally a slide into grayness as Brezhnev’s sclerotic stagnation took hold. An objective history of the Soviet mass song has yet to be written; such a work will one day provide a valuable sidelight on the history of Soviet literature and culture.⁹

The uppermost layer of mass songs consists of anthems or hymns (the word gimn is actually used in Russian.) These are songs that have been adopted for particular institutional or ceremonial purposes by Party or state. The most famous of them is also by Lebedev-Kumach. It was written in 1935 and is called “Song of the Motherland” (“Pesnya o rodine”). Even before the war it was being published in editions of twenty million copies.¹⁰ The opening notes of its portentously swelling tune have for years been used as the station identification of Radio Moscow. It begins with a refrain:

Broad is my native land,

With many forests, fields, and rivers.

I know of no other land

Where a man can breathe so freely!

The first verse runs:

From Moscow to the very furthest borders,

From southern mountains to northern seas,

Man strides like the master

Of his boundless Motherland.

Everywhere life flows free and bountiful,

Like the Volga in spate.

The young can always make their way,

The old can always find respect.

The second verse continues in the same vein of chauvinistic bombast. But we should not forget that behind the words stands the sinister reality of Stalin’s call for loyalty to the Party to take precedence over loyalty to relatives, a policy that poisoned human relationships for many years:

The eye can’t encompass our wheatfields,

We have too many towns for the mind to grasp,

Our proud word “Comrade”

Is more precious than any fine words.

With this word we’re at home everywhere,

We have no whites and blacks,

Everyone’s familiar with this word,

And with it we can find relatives everywhere.

In the text published in 1977, absolutely no trace has been allowed to remain of the verse that came third in the song for twenty years after its creation:

No-one is left out at our table,

Everyone is rewarded according to his services.

In golden letters we are writing

Stalin’s nationwide law.

No years can erase

The grandeur and fame of these words:

“A person always has the right

To study, rest, and labor!”¹¹

This “un-verse,” of course, remains loud in the memories of every Soviet citizen who has any recollection of things as they were before the mid-1950s.

The fourth and final verse of Lebedev-Kumach’s anthem contains a belligerent threat similar to the one in his “March.” We shall see that this threat is a mandatory element in the full-blown Soviet hymn:

Nobody in the world knows better than we

How to laugh and love.

But we’ll sternly knit our brows

If an enemy should wish to smash us—

We love our Motherland as if she were a bride,

And cherish her as if she were an affectionate mother.

[RSP, 167–68]

The function of this song and those like it is to promulgate and propagandize a set of myths and dogmas from the orthodox ideology, just as religious hymnology does. The first and last verses together with the refrain of Petr Gradov’s “We Are Party Members” (“My—kommunisty,” 1958) will demonstrate the occasional startling similarity of tone between Soviet hymns and those of militant Protestantism. Here is the Soviet equivalent of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”:

There are millions in our ranks,

We are the sons of Lenin.

Above us flutter victoriously

The banners of glorious October.

We are Party members,

Strong in our truth.

The aim of our life

Is the happiness of simple folk.

The aim of all our struggle and our life

Is the happiness of simple folk.

. . .

O Party of the brave and steadfast,

We are all proud of you.

We were first at the new construction sites,

And the first to go into war.

We are Party members,

Strong in our truth . . .

Here we have, expressed in song, the Party’s view of itself as “the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to build a Communist society.” Divorced from its tune and its context, the song reeks of the same odious self-congratulation that is given off by the slogans the Party puts up to itself all over Russia.

Perhaps the most perfect all-round example of a Soviet mass song of the “hymn” type, and of special interest from the point of view of its presentation of the “positive hero,” is Konstantin Vanshenkin’s “I Love You, Life” (“Ya lyublyu tebya, zhizn’,” 1956). The song is known by heart by every Soviet citizen, and is sung to a stirring, inspirational march tune. It begins:

I love you, Life,

Nothing new in itself,

I love you, Life,

I love you over and over again.

The hero is first identified as a conscientious member of the toiling masses:

Windows are already lit

As, tired, I stride home from work;

I love you, Life,

And I want you to get better.

He is not discontented with things as they are, though:

Much have I been granted—

The earth’s breadth and the sea’s expanse;

And I’ve long been familiar

With masculine selfless friendship.

In the clamor of each day,

How happy I am not to be at peace!

I have a love.

Life, you know what that means.

What it does mean is excruciatingly priggish:

When the nightingales sing,

The half-dark. A kiss at daybreak.

And the pinnacle of love,

That great miracle—children!

With a mature sigh, he sketches in the continuity of the generations:

With them once more we will go

Through childhood, youth, stations, and harbors;

Then there will be grandchildren,

And everything will begin again.

The tonality deepens as a constant awareness of the victims of war, one of the mandatory attributes of the positive hero, makes its appearance before the song ends:

Ah, how the years fly by.

We get sad as we notice our gray hairs.

Life, do you remember the soldiers

Who perished defending you?

But matters cannot end on this note; having asserted his credentials as worker, family man, mature citizen, and patriot, he can sign off with even a touch of selfishness to round off the rabble-rousing:

So exult and rise

In the trumpet-tones of a vernal hymn!

I love you, Life,

And I hope that’s mutual.

[RSP, 548–49]

Here again we have the hallmarks of Soviet Socialist Realism. The language is transparent; the form is straightforward; the imagery is vague to the point of almost total abstraction, safely avoiding anything historically specific. We note the cozy lighted windows in the first verse (mercifully, though, Vanshenkin’s nightingales are not sitting in a birch tree.) The tone is one of uplift and commitment. The positive hero has an optimism which it would be an exaggeration to call facile, but which is unclouded by worries about ultimate social, political, moral, or ethical problems. He identifies himself with his country and people, seeing himself as one of a group, a collective, rather than exploring his individual identity.

Patriotism is implied rather than stated in Vanshenkin’s song, which is dealing with love for an abstraction even greater than the idea of the Motherland. At the other extreme is the homely treatment of patriotism in a very famous song by Mikhail Matusovsky (1915- ), “Where Does the Motherland Begin?” (“S chego nachinaetsya Rodina?” 1967):

Where does the Motherland begin?

From a little picture in your spelling book,

From the good and faithful comrades

Who live in the next courtyard.

But perhaps she begins

From a song our mother sang us,

And from the thing no possible trials

Can ever take away from us.

Where does the Motherland begin?

From that dear old bench by the gates,

From that same birch tree that grows

Out in the field, bowing in the wind.

But perhaps she begins

From the springtime song of the starling,

And from that country road

Whose end cannot be seen.

Where does the Motherland begin?

From windows that glow in the distance,

From our father’s old Civil War cap

We once found in a cupboard.

But perhaps she begins

From the pounding of carriage wheels,

And from the vow that in your youth

You swore to her in your heart. . .

Where does the Motherland begin?

[RSP, 485]

This text has the reflective, elegaic note that is Matusovsky’s trademark. It exhibits the sentimental rather than the stridently chauvinistic aspect of Soviet patriotism. But it has the same vagueness of focus as the hymns, even though its surface texture seems to be full of objects. There is nothing in it that can be identified with the actual appearance of modem Russia, and we can already recognize some clichés—the birch tree, of course, and the lighted window seen from afar. The veteran father and the devoted mother are also favorite accessories in the official song.

The most prominent single theme in Soviet “mass songs” remains, thirty-five years after the end of hostilities, that of World War II, or “The Great Patriotic War,” as it is officially known in the USSR. In this respect the mass song parallels all other branches of the arts. Nobody would seek to deny or belittle the tragic reality of the Russian experience between 1941 and 1945, one of truly historic heroism and sacrifice. But it would be equally unreasonable not to recognize the wholesale exploitation of this theme in Soviet official literature. It is perhaps the only major subject on which official and popular opinions coincide; both sides claim that the Soviet cause was just, and that the war was won by the colossal efforts of a people united. It was an occasion when for the first and only time since 1917 there was national solidarity, with internal bloodletting set aside. In the enormous attention that is given to the war theme in all branches of the Soviet arts, the Party’s line is relentlessly hammered home. During the war, it claims, its leading role in national life (the only claim it has to legitimacy) was put to the supreme test and justified. Of course, tremendous modifications have had to be made to war mythology as a result of de-Stalinization, but the essential points of emphasis remain unchanged.

The exploits of the Red Army are endlessly extolled. Plenty of attention is given to the ordinary private soldier who leaves his native hut in the country or courtyard in the town, saying goodbye to sorrowing mother and/or wife. He fights all the way through to Berlin, and then returns, medaled, gray-haired in his twenties, to that same hut or courtyard (or the place it used to be) to pick up his life. His military experience has case-hardened his labor discipline. He is an example to his fellows and the object of admiration by the patient mother or fiancée who has waited faithfully for his return and will now build a family with him. Or—the preferred scenario—he sacrifices his life at the front, and is still awaited by a mother or widow faithful to his memory and by her grieving but proud children. Besides its justification of the Revolution and the subsequent history of the country, including collectivization and industrialization, the moral of the war is that it justifies Soviet patriotism. The Motherland is sacrosanct and must never be yielded to an invader. A song by Sergei Vasil’ev, a poet born in 1911 who has an immaculately orthodox literary pedigree, finds a maximally simple image to articulate this message. It is that same hardworking birch tree. The song is called “The White Birch” (“Belaya bereza,” 1950):

I remember a birch tree being wounded

By a bomb splinter one dawn.

Its ice-cold sap ran like tears

Down its mutilated bark.

Beyond the wood the guns thundered,

Powder smoke billowed up.

But we stood firm for the capital

And saved that birch tree that grew near Moscow.

And then one very early spring

The white birch once more

Was dressed in new leaves

And made the earth beautiful.

And since that time to all threats

There’s only one thing we say:

We’ll never allow anyone to hurt

Our dear Russian birch again.

[RSP, 401]

If one phrase could express the essence of the interpretation of the war theme in the Soviet arts, it would be “justified sacrifice.” The theme manifestly accommodates that part of the people’s religious impulse that is not absorbed by the Party’s cult of Lenin. The motifs that appear with the greatest regularity are the concept of laying down one’s life for one’s neighbor, and the moral obligations imposed on later generations by those who made the supreme sacrifice. Here is a song by Lev Kuklin, written in 1965, and unusual in that the singer is female. The song is an illustration of the permissible limits of tragedy:

Song of My Father

I don’t know where you are buried,

Far away from your beloved home.

Over you the branch of the birch doesn’t bend,

Bitter grasses have grown up there.

In that victorious year of’ 45

We all waited for you on the porch.

If you served with him, soldiers,

Tell me about my father!

Was he gray-eyed, like me?

I know nothing about him.

I never saw my father even once.

I know no pictures of him . . .

Like wounds, the sunsets burned,

He went forward in fire and lead.

If you fought beside him, soldiers,

Tell me about my father!

A soldier’s fame is anonymous.

But I believe in my father.

And it seems to me that the trees and grass

Whisper his noble name . . .

Perhaps he didn’t live long in this world,

But I know he was honest to the end.

I want to be like my father,

I want to be worthy of my father!

[RSP, 662]

Here again we have imagery that is commonplace to the point of cliché: the birch tree yet again, the porch, the sunset; and again, nothing is specific. Everything swims in a thick soup of sentimentality.

Of course, by no means all Soviet “mass songs” are overtly political. There is a large corpus of approved songs about love. The archetypal Soviet love song is one of respectable, requited love, leading to stable home and family life, as in Vanshenkin’s “I Love You, Life.” It could be claimed that the mass love song is an even more powerful advocate and repository of “middle-class values” than Soviet fiction.¹² An unhappy end to a love affair is sanctioned only, it seems, if the man is killed in action defending the Motherland. Infidelity, triangles, crimes of passion, philandering, sex for its own sake, are almost totally absent. As an example we may take “Evenings near Moscow” (“Podmos-kovnye vechera,” 1955) by Mikhail Matusovsky, whose “Where Does the Motherland Begin?” was discussed earlier:

Not even a rustle can be heard in the garden,

Everything has fallen still until morning.

If you only knew how dear to me

Are those evenings near Moscow.

The river moves and then stops moving,

All made of the moon’s silver.

A song can be heard and then it can’t

In those quiet evenings.

My dear, why do you give me a sidelong glance,

Bowing your head down low?

It’s hard to say, but not to say,

Everything that’s in my heart.

And dawn keeps getting lighter,

So please be kind, and like me,

Don’t you forget these summer

Evenings near Moscow.

[RSP, 472]

It is not surprising that when this song became something of an international hit in the late 1950s, it left its words behind in Russia. Again they have the elegaic quality in which Matusovsky specializes, but they are quite typical of the approved Soviet love song: saccharine, sentimental, extremely vague, and naive. They bring in an affinity between human beings (who behave with impeccable decorum) and a natural scene which is very vague (garden, river, moon) but which is safely identified with a patriotic locale in the refrain line.

At its best, the mass love song is timeless and utterly simple. Here is a very popular song, again by Matusovsky, one that uses the ritual threefold repetitions of folklore. It is called “The Old Maple Tree” (“Staryi klen,” 1961):

The old maple tree, old maple tree, old maple tree knocks on the windowpane,

Asking me to go out for a walk with you.

Why, why, why do I feel so fine?

Because you simply walked down the street.

The snow, the snow, the snow has been gone for long,

It looks as if spring has come to visit us again;

Why, why, why are things so good?

Because you simply smiled at me.

Look, look, look at the sky,

See it shine, cloudless and clean.

Why, why, why is that accordion singing?

It’s because someone loves the accordionist.

[RSP, 477]

Of course, things are not always as straightforward as in this song. There are mass songs about the eternal sad subjects of song: parting, separation, unhappy first love, nostalgia for lost places and times. But joy, acceptance, or at least the positive consequence of an unhappy experience, such as wisdom after the event or stoicism in the face of adversity, are always dominant, even in the rare mass songs about unrequited love. There are only a couple of them in Russian Soviet Songs, 1917–1977. One of them, Nikolai Dorizo’s “So Many Golden Lights” (“Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh”), written in 1953, contains an incipient triangle and even potential adultery. But the female principal of the song is going to be strong in her resolve not to disturb the marital status quo:

There’re so many golden lights

On the streets of Saratov.

There’s so many bachelor boys,

But I love a boy who’s married.

Ah, he started a family early!. . .

It’s a sad story!

I hide my love from myself,

And even more from him.

I want to run away from him

As soon as he appears;

But what if everything I keep silent about

Should speak out for itself?

I ought not to see him,

For I’m afraid he’ll like me.

I’ll come to terms with love on my own,

For we can’t do that together!

[RSP, 450]

The awesome gap between the attitude expressed here and normal Soviet sexual relations will be apparent to anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Soviet life as it really is. But in the mass song, the nuclear family is sacrosanct. Only death in war condones the absence of a spouse and a resulting one-parent family.

Even more sacrosanct, and having unmistakable parallels with avowed religion, is the image of the mother, in song as in other aspects of Soviet official art. It is quite unthinkable to find a negatively portrayed mother in official songs. It is even more unthinkable to find a song dealing with the grinding harshness of motherhood in present-day Soviet conditions. In song, the preferred mother is elderly, and if possible a war widow. The dominant convention is to deal with the subject from the point of view of the erring son, whose mother never forgets, always forgives, is patient, not very well dressed, and above all tired. A good example is Nikolai Starshinov’s “To My Mother” (“Materi,” 1959):

The slushy snow is dark on the street,

Water’s starting to drip from the roofs.

You’ve been busy all day and you’re tired,

And now you’re sitting by your window.

She is alone; she had a big family, but they have all left her and gone their own way, and she stoically hid her tears as she saw them off. They all “forgot to write,” and she waited for months on end for news of them. Finally:

Now I’m embracing you again.

I’m so happy we’re together today!

I didn’t write. I forgot. I understand . . .

Forgive me, please. It’s my fault. . .

[RSP, 605]

Perhaps the ultimate “mommy song” is Igor’ Shaferan’s “Our Mommies” (“Nashi mamy,” 1974):

That springtime looked as if it would be eternal—

And from the frames on the walls looked down

Our mommies in their wedding dresses,

Our mommies, still quite young.

Their eyebrows like spread wings,

Not a single wrinkle by their eyes;

Who would believe there was a time

When our mommies were younger than we are now?

We’re still soaring up in our dawn dreams,

Our mommies are out of bed before it’s really light.

We’re rushing away again somewhere—

Our mommies stand and wave behind us.

And the sons’ sadnesses lie

Like white snow on their temples;

If we could choose our mothers

We would still choose our own.

You can travel all over Russia,

Spend many days on the road,

You’ll never meet anyone more beautiful,

You’ll never meet anyone more dear.

So send them a telegram more often,

Try and warm them with a letter.

Our mommies can do anything in the world,

Except not grow old.

[RSP, 652]

The large proportion of songs in which concern is expressed for an older woman who is alone reflects, of course, a central demographic fact about Soviet society. But the matter goes deeper than that; the “guilt of the erring son” theme has profound roots in classical Russian literature.

Besides official songs of the “hymn” type, patriotic songs, love songs, and “mommy songs,” there are several other prominent thematic divisions within the Soviet mass song. For instance, there is a whole corpus of what might be called “theme songs” for the various professions and the branches of the armed forces. As an example we may take “The Geologists,” written jointly by Sergei Grebennikov and Nikolai Dobronravov in 1959. The protagonist is female.

I’ve gone away into the sultry steppes,

And you’ve gone to explore the taiga.

Above me is only the burning sun,

Above you there’s only the cedars in the snow . . .

Its refrain goes:

But the road is long and far,

And there’s no turning back.

Hold on, geologist, be strong, geologist—

You’re the brother of wind and sun!

Another verse of this song must contain the most agonizingly wrought metaphor ever produced by a songwriter desperate for something to make his words catch the attention of his intended public:

I’ll never find a better friend.

The two of us are geologists;

In life we know how to tell

Precious ore from empty ore!

[RSP, 607]

There is also a very large body of mass songs whose purpose is to laud the virtues of particular places; “Evenings near Moscow” has an element of that, and there are many others about the capital city. Leningrad too has been the subject of many songs, whose accessories can be guessed without straining the imagination too much—the white nights are the most frequent prop. There are also some songs in praise of more out-of-the-way corners of the “wide native land”; they usually manage to bring in one or more of the favored themes. Nikolai Dorizo’s “It’s a Long Time Since I’d Been in the Donbass” (“Davno ne byval ya v Donbasse,” 1956) is a real grab bag:

It’s a long time since I’d been in the Donbass,

And I felt drawn back to my native places,

Where to this day has been left on the shelf

That coal-mining youth of mine.

It’s stayed the same,

Even though I’ve been far away.

And there has to be a girl called Galya

Living in her factory town there.

. . .

At last I got to the Donbass,

And there was her little white house. . .

A gray-haired housewife on the clean terrace

Was calmly doing the washing.

. . .

Forgive me my cruel memory

Of the plaits you used to wear,

And that as the years pass, men

Stay younger than their girl classmates.

Forgive me for those moonlit nights,

And that it was not in this place

I searched for and found someone

Just like you in your faraway youth.

[RSP, 458–59]

Whether a song can become genuinely popular as a result of sheer promotion by the media and other systems in the USSR is as difficult a question to answer as whether in capitalist society a song can be made into a hit through “hype,” or through promotional effort. There would probably be agreement between the people professionally involved in both systems that nothing at their disposal could make a song into a hit if the public, the people itself, did not make the decision to accept the song. But there is the same difference between the situation in Russia and the West in this regard as in all others. In the USSR, the Party-state axis has an economic monopoly, and there is no real competition inside the public system. A Soviet song that has official approval can receive promotion on a scale undreamed of by public relations executives in the West. Its impact can saturate society from top to bottom, and even include the education system, which is subject to the Party’s mandate as much as if not more than any other area of national life.

To write a song that achieves official approval and promotion in the USSR is a path to immense fame, privilege, and riches, greater potentially than for any novelist or poet. There is, not surprisingly, a corps of specialized lyricists (tekstoviki) and composers whose careers are based on the mass song, and who are very protective in their attitudes toward it—as we shall see in greater detail when we examine their attitudes toward the rise of their amateur rivals in the 1960s.¹³ Their prototype was Lebedev-Kumach, who has already been mentioned. The doyen in the 1960s was Mikhail Isakovsky (1900–1973), one of the true classics of Socialist Realist literature, the author of “Katyusha” (1938), the only Soviet “mass song” to have become genuinely popular on an international scale. There is Evgeny Dolmatovsky (bom 1915), Shostakovich’s librettist on several occasions, and author of such classic Soviet songs as “Komsomol Volunteers” (“Komsomol’tsy-dobrovol’tsy,” 1957), a stirring march whose chorus runs:

Komsomols and volunteers,

We’re strong in our true friendship.

We’ll go through fire, if need be

To open up our youthful paths.

Komsomols and volunteers,

We have to believe and love wholeheartedly;

Sometimes to see the sun before dawn—

That’s the only way to find happiness!

[RSP, 229]

Then there is Lev Oshanin (bom 1912), currently a very high official in literary politics. His “Lenin Is Always with Thee” (“Lenin vsegda s toboi,” 1955) illustrates one of the most cherished and most heavily promoted Soviet themes:

The years run past, day after day—

The dawns of new generations.

But nobody anywhere

Will forget Lenin’s name.

Lenin is always alive,

Lenin is always with thee—

In grief, hope, and joy.

Lenin is in springtime,

In every happy day,

Lenin is in you and in me.

A long time ago, amid stem gloom,

At the dawn of Soviet power,

He said that on earth

We would build happiness for people.

We walk behind the Party,

Praising the Motherland with our deeds,

And throughout our great journey,

In every deed Lenin is with us.

Lenin is always alive . . .

[RSP, 320]

The parallels with Christian hymnology are too obvious to require comment.

A much less well-known Soviet lyricist, but one who has made a considerable contribution to the repertoire, specializing in lyric songs about love and nature, is Aleksei Fat’yanov (1919–1959). Similar in stature to Fat’yanov but specializing in the opposite kind of song, the heavily official, is Vladimir Kharitonov, author of such songs as “Russia Is My Motherland” (“Rossiya—Rodina moya,” 1950), “A Son of Russia” (“Syn Rossii,” 1954), “March of the Communist Brigades” (“Marsh kommunisticheskikh brigad,” 1958), and “My Address Is the Soviet Union” (“Moi adres—Sovetskii Soyuz,” 1972).

Several poets of the generation bom in the decade immediately preceding the war have contributed songs that have already become classics of the official repertoire. Of them, the best-established is Robert Rozhdestvensky, bom in 1932 and in print since before 1950 with what is now a very weighty oeuvre of highly acclaimed verse. He tends to be the poet with whose work Party-minded Soviet youth identify most closely as an expression of their ideals. His songs in the official repertoire include “Ballad about Colors” (“Ballada o kraskakh,” 1970). This song is about a mother who has two sons, one red-haired and the other black-haired. They go to war in 1941, and she is the only mother for three villages around whose sons come back. But both now have the same color hair—gray. Rozhdestvensky’s “The Enormous Sky” (“Ogromnoe nebo,” 1971) is a copybook example of an “optimistic tragedy,” a song about two friends, both Air Force pilots. They sacrifice their lives by refusing to bail out when their plane gets into difficulties over a city—they remain on board and make sure it crashes into a wood (inevitably, a birch wood). The idealism that permeates Rozhdestvensky’s songs at times becomes indistinguishable from religious mysticism, which is the case with many official songs about the ultimate destiny of the individual. A particularly interesting example is “On the Far Side of the Clouds” (“Tam, za oblakami,”1973):

The young rain is rippling in the sky,

The winds fly over the sleepless plains. . .

If only I could know what awaits me beyond the distant boundary,

On the far side of the horizon.

Not for nothing did I seek the high heaven,

And sleep under the cover of the big snows;

But I did find out what the dawn is like

On the other side of the clouds.

I believe that in putting up with all my failures,

Giving up my life to my friends and my journeys,

I will recognize love, I will encounter you

On the far side of a turning.

If something terrible happens to me,

Don’t pace out the melancholy earth,

Just know that you can always find my heart

On the far side of the clouds.

[RSP, 585]

Rozhdestvensky is an accomplished poet with a sincere and questing intellect. Even his most orthodox songs contain what could be seen as the seed of their own destruction in his persistent leaning toward sadness and mysticism. After Rozhdestvensky, the most eminent contributor of the prewar generation of poets to the repertoire of official mass song is Yevtushenko, a rather more vulgar and facile poet than Rozhdestvensky who has a record of face-saving conflicts with the literary authorities. His “Do the Russians Want War?” (“Khotyat li russkie voiny?” 1961) is a very good example of the mass song on a military subject. It promotes the official line that the Russians because of their past sufferings are by nature peace-loving and not aggressive, but that when the Motherland is threatened by an external enemy, they will fight to the last man:

Do the Russians want war?

You just ask the silence

Over the broad expanse of plowland and field,

The birches and poplars.

You just ask the soldiers

Who lie there under the birches,

And their sons will tell you—

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want war?

It was not just for their country

That soldiers perished in that war,

But so the people of all the earth

Could sleep peacefully at night.

As the ones who did the fighting,

And who embraced you on the Elbe

(We remain faithful to that memory)—

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want war?

Yes, we know how to make war,

But we do not want our soldiers

To fall in battle once more

Onto their bitter soil.

You just ask the mothers,

You ask my wife.

And then you really will have to understand—

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want,

Do the Russians want war?

[RSP, 616–17]

This song is ideologically immaculate. In addition, it has two excellent examples of what Western pop professionals would call “hooks.” The first is the reference to the Red Army’s meeting up with the Allied armies on the Elbe in 1945, and the implication that whereas the Soviets have remained faithful to the idea of cooperation against evil, the Western allies have let them down. The second, on a more sneaky level, is the reference to “my wife,” which turns the whole song around by implying that it is sung by a ghost.

The references to nature in Yevtushenko’s song are also worth noticing. As in so many official songs, we find the birch tree, which is joined here by the poplar, and a reference to Russia’s broad expanse of plowed land and fields. The landscape evoked in the song is for most Russians a bucolic dream that has nothing to do with the conditions under which they actually live. In part, the imagery of the official mass song derives from a carefully selected, burnished, and bowdlerized version of Russian folk song.

The study of folklore is a massive academic industry in the USSR, taking in the collection, publication, and study of texts.¹⁴ Folklore is studied under the same conditions as the rest of Soviet scholarship: it has a Party mandate to work to. It supplies an image that fits hand in glove with the Party’s conception of the history of Russia as one of centuries of the peoples’ suffering, relieved at last by the October Revolution. Traditional folklore is selected and edited in order to produce an image of Russia and the Russians that conforms with the norms of the Party’s expectation from literature of the Soviet period, and it is manipulated to express the same attributes that we have seen in the official mass songs. Folklore is not only collected, published, studied, and taught. It is also performed, and with a vengeance, throughout the entertainment industry of the USSR. Never a day goes by without Moscow Radio’s churning out yet another women’s choir from the Sverdlovsk region, a group of balalaika players from Ust-Ilimsk, or the Old Bolsheviks’ Choir of the Kirov Region, singing the same old staples from the folk repertoire. The use of stylistic and thematic elements from folklore in the mass song is highly approved of, and is always mentioned as a positive element when songs are discussed.

The approved repertoire of official mass song is promoted through a system of controls. Singers in the USSR have a “repertoire sheet” that lists the songs they are permitted to perform. The songs on the list form the subject of the same sort of fierce bargaining that writers have with their editors and editors with Glavlit, the state’s organ of censorship for the printed word. This bargaining takes place between the singer (or his agent) and the representative of the appropriate local branch of Glavrepertkom, the “Main Committee for Repertoire,” which is responsible for controlling the repertoire of all aspects of the performing arts in the USSR. If a singer is caught performing songs not authorized on his list, he may be punished in a number of ways, chief among them being denial of the opportunity to give concerts, or restriction to less lucrative or prestigious work.¹⁵ Again as in the case of writers, the material self-interest of the performer in the USSR is a major stimulus working for self-censorship and the promotion of officially approved material.

The official mass song has an approved repertoire, and it also may be said to have an approved style of performance. Despite the breakthrough that was made in the late 1950s with the arrival of Mark Bernes, the first Soviet crooner, Soviet singers still have a pompous, stiff aspect compared with their Western colleagues. The archetypal performers of the mass song are the huge choirs maintained by various institutions of the Soviet state, the most famous being that of the Red Army. The adipose, self-important dignity of the state and its massive apparatus can be strongly sensed in their style.

Such, then, is the official Soviet “mass song,” playing its appointed part along with the other branches of the arts in embodying the Party’s ideology in images acceptable to it, actively shepherding the country’s people along the road the Party decrees, reinforcing the Party’s version of its history, creating an icon of the new Soviet man at work and in his private life.

It will be obvious that the official song as represented in this anthology leaves vast areas of human experience and emotion untouched. It has no satirical element, nor could it have without bringing about the destruction of the whole edifice of conventions. Its capacity for humor of any kind is severely limited. It is highly stylized in language and imagery, using elements divorced from common speech. It draws compulsively on a few favored images that come from a version of archaic rural folklore rather than the urban life familiar to the majority of the present-day population of the country. More important still, its emotional range is restricted. Joy, happiness, determination, pride, fidelity, and defiance are amply provided for, even required. But despair, anger, lust, hopeless longing, revenge, and many other fundamental drives and emotions can find no place in it, not to mention the entire middle range of emotions centering on contented passivity. The official song deals with life as seen through ideologically tinted spectacles; it offers examples for emulation rather than recognizable aspects of lived experience. The real life of real people in the country from day to day has very little connection with what the Party wants these people to sing about. In the song, as elsewhere in the Soviet arts, there are extensive aspects of the country’s historical experience that cannot be publicly discussed at all, and many others (such as the war) that can be discussed only in a certain way.

But to sing about the whole range of experience and emotion seems to be a universal human need. And the Russians gratify this need—but not through the official mass song.